Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, Department of Psychology, Bangor University, Gwynedd LL57 2AS, UK; Montreal Neurological Institute, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2B4, Canada.
Department of Psychology and Hotchkiss Brain Institute, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada.
Cognition. 2024 Jul;248:105794. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105794. Epub 2024 Apr 23.
Multiple representation theories posit that concepts are represented via a combination of properties derived from sensorimotor, affective, and linguistic experiences. Recently, it has been proposed that information derived from social experience, or socialness, represents another key aspect of conceptual representation. How these various dimensions interact to form a coherent conceptual space has yet to be fully explored. To address this, we capitalized on openly available word property norms for 6339 words and conducted a large-scale investigation into the relationships between 18 dimensions. An exploratory factor analysis reduced the dimensions to six higher-order factors: sub-lexical, distributional, visuotactile, body action, affective and social interaction. All these factors explained unique variance in performance on lexical and semantic tasks, demonstrating that they make important contributions to the representation of word meaning. An important and novel finding was that the socialness dimension clustered with the auditory modality and with mouth and head actions. We suggest this reflects experiential learning from verbal interpersonal interactions. Moreover, formally modelling the network structure of semantic space revealed pairwise partial correlations between most dimensions and highlighted the centrality of the interoception dimension. Altogether, these findings provide new insights into the architecture of conceptual space, including the importance of inner and social experience, and highlight promising avenues for future research.
多种表示理论假设概念是通过结合来自感觉运动、情感和语言经验的属性来表示的。最近，有人提出，来自社会经验或社会性的信息代表了概念表示的另一个关键方面。这些不同的维度如何相互作用形成一个连贯的概念空间尚未得到充分探索。为了解决这个问题，我们利用了 6339 个单词的公开可用单词属性规范，并对 18 个维度之间的关系进行了大规模调查。探索性因素分析将这些维度减少到六个高阶因素：亚词汇、分布、视觉触觉、身体动作、情感和社会互动。所有这些因素都在词汇和语义任务的表现上解释了独特的差异，这表明它们对单词意义的表示做出了重要贡献。一个重要而新颖的发现是，社会性维度与听觉模态以及口腔和头部动作聚类。我们认为这反映了从言语人际互动中获得的经验学习。此外，正式模拟语义空间的网络结构揭示了大多数维度之间的成对部分相关，并突出了内感受维度的中心地位。总之，这些发现为概念空间的结构提供了新的见解，包括内部和社会经验的重要性，并为未来的研究提供了有希望的途径。
